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Can’t sleep? You’re not alone.
A study into the sleep habits of our nation found that a mere 38% of us can be classified as ‘good sleepers’, whereas 30% of us experience severe sleep deprivation1 - so it’s not just you who struggles to switch off at night!
Many factors determine how much sleep you need a night, one of them being your age.
See the table below for the average hours of sleep you should be getting per night, depending on how old you are.3
Age range | Average hours of sleep needed per night |
---|---|
Babies (4-12 months old) | 12-16 |
Toddlers (1-2 years old) | 11-14 |
Children 3-5 years old | 10-13 |
Children 6-12 years old | 9-12 |
Teenagers (13-18 years old) | 8-10 |
Adults (18-64 years old) | 7-9 |
Older adults (65+) | 7-8 |
As you can see, younger people tend to need more hours of sleep per night to help their brains develop.
Deep sleep is the most restorative sleep we experience. During deeper sleep stages, our bodies put energy into tissue repair and growth, as well as hormone release and energy restoration. It also helps us the most out of all the sleep cycles to feel refreshed and revived during the following day.
Most deep sleep occurs in sleep stage 3 read more about sleep cycles below.
Sleep stage 1: we experience very light sleep in this cycle and can be woken easily. It usually lasts 5-10 minutes at the start of our sleep
Sleep stage 2: our heart rates slow down and body temperature drops in this cycle. It usually lasts 20 minutes at a time and makes up around 50% of your total sleep (you have multiple cycles of this stage throughout the night)
Sleep stage 3: our muscles relax and blood pressure/breathing rates drop in this stage and we become non-responsive and very difficult to wake. This is our deepest sleep cycle and helps us transition into REM sleep.
REM sleep: Rapid Eye Movement sleep causes your body to become immobilised while your brain becomes more active, your eyes move rapidly and you have dreams – this stage can last up to an hour and around 20% of total sleep is made up of this stage.4
Although there are guidelines for how much sleep you should be getting a night, usually dependent on your age, everyone has individual sleep needs; 7 hours of sleep may feel like plenty for you, whereas another person would feel like it’s barely scratching the surface.
Don’t worry though, your body will let you know if you’re not getting enough sleep! If you have one or more of the following signs, it’s a good indicator that you may not be getting adequate sleep:
How do you like to sleep? On your stomach? On your side? Or maybe full-on starfish?
We all sleep differently. For some, this means dropping off and waking up in relatively the same position as you nodded off in. While for others, it means sleeping in lots of different positions throughout the night.
There are three main sleeping positions:
Sleeping on your side is reportedly the most popular sleeping position.5 It can help in the snoring stakes too because when you sleep on your side, your airways are more open than if you sleep on your back.6
So, we’ve established the most popular sleeping position. What about the best sleeping positions?
Are you a:
We don’t always sleep the same way every single night either although we do tend to have one or two sleeping positions we always seem to instinctively lie in.15
Because of all of these different variables, there isn’t an overall best sleeping position, but we can choose the best positions based on our own sleep journeys.